Theodor Adorno Quotes | GloryQuotes

Theodor Adorno Quotes About Art

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Theodor Adorno Quotes About Love

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

There is no love that is not an echo.

More Quotes by Theodor Adorno

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Browse 79 quotes attributed to Theodor Adorno, listed in the source data as a German Philosopher, organized around themes such as Art, Love, Time. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.